PHOTO COURTESY OF KATHERINE SLINGLUFF, WGBH BOSTON
In September, general contractor Carl Hithe, architect Rick Fifield, homeowner Rashida Ferdinand, 'This Old House' master carpenter Norm Abram and show host Kevin O'Connor gather on the front porch of the Holy Cross house targeted for a television rebuild.

By Dave WalkerTV columnist

Rashida Ferdinand's Katrina-flooded Holy Cross home is just one of the stars of the 10-episode arc of "This Old House" premiering Thursday night on WYES-Channel 12.

The PBS show, nearing its 30th anniversary on the air, traditionally locks in on one rehab home each cycle -- while spinning off on side-trips to spotlight hardware purveyors and craftspeople. The New Orleans-set semi-season, however, will take a much broader look at the city's comeback.

Based on the premiere episode, which was made available to The Times-Picayune, it appears that "This Old House" intends to accurately portray our city's position on the helpless/hopeful continuum -- an important service for viewers here and elsewhere.

For every shot of the wasted Lower 9th Ward, there's a balancing shot of Musicians' Village volunteers. Pictures of a trash pile and abandoned home in Holy Cross segue to a Preservation Resource Center project and a private homeowners' like-new restored shotgun (albeit one with its front gate chained to a post to discourage architectural-detail pillaging).

A later episode will visit Broadmoor homes bustling with volunteers from the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Occupational Therapy marshaled for the job by Rebuilding Together, a local redevelopment nonprofit helping low-income elderly and disabled homeowners.

Other scheduled side-trips during the season include an examination of French Quarter preservation efforts, a Mercy Corps project, a Bywater carpenter milling historically accurate French doors, a revisit to the Algiers Point shotgun double the show renovated during the 1990-91 season, a streetcar ride and an R&R visit to Frenchmen Street to peruse its music scene.

"We always felt this couldn't just be about this house," said Norm Abram, the show's master carpenter since its 1979 premiere, during a Sept. 11 publicity kickoff event at Ferdinand's house. "It couldn't be about one person.

"It's got to be all about inspiration."

At the time, Abram and host Kevin O'Connor had already shot the first episode's opening sequence in the 9th Ward, and the impact of the setting was still sinking in.

"It's hard to stand on top of that wall and look out over the field," Abram said. "We say in the opening of the show that there were hundreds of houses there, just wiped away. A whole community of people who had raised families there for generations.

"You look out there and you just have to feel so much for those people, because where are they now? We hope that doing this will maybe inspire more projects and more volunteers to help so that people can get back."

The back story

An 1890s raised shotgun built partly from barge boards, Ferdinand's house took in waist-high water after the storm. Ferdinand, an artist, had bought the home and begun renovations before Hurricane Katrina. When she returned six months after the storm, she managed to gut her drywall but otherwise made little headway until "This Old House" came to call.

In September, with Road Home money and a Historic Building Recovery Grant from the state lieutenant governor's office and the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism -- not to mention the advice and oversight she'd be getting from Abram, O'Connor and their team -- Ferdinand was poised for some accelerated progress.

A model of the finished project displayed at the kickoff event showcased the camelback addition that local architect Rick Fifield had designed for the home, one that would add upstairs bedrooms and a bathroom and a spectacular view of Mississippi River traffic and the downtown skyline.

STAFF FILE PHOTO
By mid-December, a camelback addition to the historic 1890s shotgun was nearing completion.

Unlike most local homeowners still struggling to restore, Ferdinand had a definite time line for completion of her project: The season's last scenes, including a "wrap" party inside the completed home, would be shot no later than early February.

Standing in for thousands of rebuilding New Orleanians and their homes, Ferdinand and her riverside corner lot appeared a perfect fit for "This Old House."

Look one way from her yard: Milton P. Doullut's steamboat houses.

Look the other: the New Orleans skyline.

Look almost anywhere else: devastation.

Introducing Ferdinand to the small crowd gathered in the sweltering heat, O'Connor said, "If you want to know why we picked this house, this is all you need to know right here."

New Orleans project: take two

Fast-forward about a month. Ferdinand was seated on her still-sweltering porch, talking on her cell phone with a subcontractor as workmen bustled past her into the house.

The "uh-oh" plot twist, in which unexpected repairs are identified well after work is under way, is as much a "This Old House" staple as the season-concluding, all's-well-that-ends-well wrap party.

For Ferdinand, the "uh-oh" moment was the discovery of unexpected mold. A tree had fallen on her roof during the storm, apparently causing water damage in portions of the structure she hadn't completely gutted and treated with mold-remediation techniques.

"I thought I (caught all the mold) but I'm learning that I didn't," she said.

Abram is usually the bearer of bad news at "uh-oh" time.

"On the show, Kevin's the eternal optimist and I'm the eternal pessimist -- more accurately, maybe, the realist, who says, 'Oh, no. Wait a minute,'¤" Abram said. "The house is in pretty good condition. I didn't expect many nightmares to show up after the fact."

But they always do.

"I'm sure there are a lot of houses around the area where people look at them and say, 'Oh, a little paint, patch up the windows, fix the roof and we're good to go,'¤" Abram said. "And they're going to find out later when they move into it, 'Oh, gee. We've got to fix this, we've got to fix that.'¤"

"Regardless, it's an issue we had to deal with," he said, adding that he suspected many rebuilding in New Orleans will be faced with similar mid-restoration surprises. Accordingly, the show added a detailed mold-remediation segment.

"The issue for me is that it becomes a financial issue, because it costs so much to do it correctly," Abram said. "How do you get it done? Most people are doing what they can, and financial considerations aren't even coming in. Spray a little bleach on the walls and maybe it'll go away. We have to tell that story, that that's not how it happens. Whether they can do it or not, I don't know. We can't do much about that. I think we have to inform them."

STAFF FILE PHOTO
'This Old House' master carpenter Norm Abram, left, gets some direction from director David Voss, right, during filming of the renovation of Ferdinand's Lower 9th Ward house. A 10-episode arc debuting on TV this week will also focus on tales of the city's comeback.

In addition to dealing with such surprises, Ferdinand was faced with daily aesthetic decisions -- lately a familiar circumstance for local homeowners.

She described the hours of early morning and late-night preparation she'd been doing as "homework," but added that it was necessary to maintain the pace of progress.

"We're rebuilding a house at a very accelerated pace," Ferdinand said. "It's just quick decision making and listening to all of the different information and insights from the experts and professionals. It's exciting, definitely, but it's a learning process. It's kind of an amazement that it's happened so fast, because everything else has been such a slow, slow process."

Local color

The key sequence to be captured that day by the "This Old House" crew was the opening for a midseason episode. O'Connor and Abram circled Ferdinand's Holy Cross neighborhood in a pickup truck while their camera crew shot their conversation out of the back of a minivan.

Jeff Ruhe, executive producer, drove the van as the two hosts polished their intro spiel (with talking-points prompting from a director and producer crouched down behind them in the pickup's back seat), all the while rolling through devastated streets.

The cast and crew of "This Old House" doesn't stay on the ground in a project city for the duration of a remote shoot, though work continues when they all return to their Boston-area base.

All told, the season's 10 episodes will be captured in about eight evenly spaced shooting visits. Meanwhile, additional video footage and still photos have been shot to feed the show's multimedia outlets, which include a Web site (www.thisoldhouse.com, where live cameras remain focused on Ferdinand's house), a weekly e-mail newsletter and a magazine (published 10 times a year, plus special issues).

Abram's first visit to New Orleans since Katrina was the start of shooting in September. During his next visit, he said he'd since had to revise his initial impressions of the city's condition.

"I think your vision changes slightly, because you're so overwhelmed the first time you come down here, and you're sort of on overload," he said later. "I think you actually miss a lot. You're overloaded with all these images. You come back and it hasn't gotten any better. In some ways, I almost see it as a more difficult situation than the first time around. Not because there hasn't been progress. I just seem to see a lot more.

"You say, 'Jeez, how is this ever going to happen?'¤"

O'Connor said the differences between a typical "This Old House" season and this New Orleans trip are stark.

"Most of the projects we do are homeowners in established neighborhoods who are doing restoration because it's the fulfillment of a dream that they've been (planning) for 10 years, saving their money," he said. "In this situation, it's born of necessity. Everything you're doing isn't friendly neighbors gawking over what (workers) are doing."

Rather, it's working among deserted houses in a ruined neighborhood.

"The thing that struck me is, what's harder: doing the work or making the decision to come back?" O'Connor said. "Everywhere you look, it's empty. It still just kind of freaks me out. Two doors to the right, two doors to the left, boarded up. I'm not sure how people make those decisions."

Preservation consideration

Later, during the same October visit, as the LSU Health Sciences Center volunteers worked inside a Broadmoor home, Abram pondered the sorrow of the trash piles that still mar the neighborhood's front sidewalks. Surely there were recyclable architectural treasures in those piles.

"That's always hard for us," Abram said. "Being a New Englander and Yankee, it's like, 'There's got to be something you can do with this.'

"We've always tried to preserve the historic fabric of any house we worked on. You know you can't do it totally, often because it's not an inexpensive approach to renovating a house."

Ferdinand, Abram said, had done well to save a lot of salvageable elements of her home, including some old flooring and a bathtub.

"It's encouraging that it's not going in a landfill," he said. "It is tough to see historic elements just get thrown away. Sometimes you can't help it.

"A lot of it's driven by economics. People want to get back in here. They want a roof over their heads. Maybe some of them will stockpile some of these things and reincorporate them into their houses. But I don't think that's what they're thinking about right now."

Porch conversations

Fast forward to four days ago. Lose the swelter; cue some cold rain.

The scene to be shot is an unbroken walk-and-talk -- another "This Old House" staple -- from Ferdinand's new side porch into her new family room and out onto her new back porch. En route, she and Abram discuss the project's progress and greet its new general contractor, Larry Schneider.

Yes, a new contractor. The original, Carl Hithe, was replaced by Schneider about halfway through the shoot. The reasons for the change will be dealt with during an episode, and there will be few sequences in the upcoming season of "This Old House" that will ring truer for local viewers.

According to Abram, it's a first for the series.

"The first contractor couldn't keep up with the schedule, and that's really critical to our end, the production side," Abram said. "So we brought in Larry. He's done a terrific job."

The second big "uh-oh" moment is foreshadowed in the season's premiere episode, during a conversation between Abram and Hithe in which they discuss the post-Katrina difficulties all rebuilding homeowners here face in securing dependable subcontractors.

"The loyalty that subs generally have with the general contractor is usually pretty solid, but there's so much work, and when people start throwing numbers out there, it gets pretty tempting," Abram said. "We saw it when we were in Miami after (Hurricane) Andrew (shooting six episodes for the 1993 season), same thing. A lot of people in there, not all of them qualified, and knowing that phone calls weren't being returned. A lot of people will relate to it."

O'Connor said the contractor change put the project about two weeks behind, but its completion date remains the same. Schneider and his team have their work cut out for them.

"It's frustrating for any homeowner to have to go through that," O'Connor said. "It's harder for us because of the artificial timeline. There's a hard end date you can't go beyond.

"I would say today we stand in really good shape. The critical thing I think at this point is you have to see progress every week. We don't have the flexibility with this schedule to let things slip or fall.

"It's going to be a sprint to the finish, but it always is."

TV columnist Dave Walker can be reached at dwalker@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3429.

THIS OLD HOUSEWhat: A 10-episode arc showcasing the restoration of a New Orleans shotgun house in the Lower 9th Ward When: Premieres Thursday at 7 p.m. Where: WYES-Channel 12 Information: www.thisoldhouse.com